When I was a boy, every Sunday evening after the dinner dishes had been washed and the kitchen tidied up, my parents and I would sit down in front of our wood cabinet console encased (first for our family) color television set and watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Hosted by the eminently calm Marlin […]
The most scared I have ever been as the result of an encounter with another living creature involved a close call with a Fer-de-Lance (Bothrops asper) along a trail in Panama. Even after the encounter was over, I felt physically ill for most an hour. Yet even so, my fascination for this astonishingly beautiful as well as highly venomous viper grew as a result of the experience.
As Bowden told Brooke Gladstone during an interview on WNYC’s On the Media regarding his recent book Dreamland, “My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea and then nail the damn door shut.” It is a dream that he has unquestionably realized.